Inside The Black
by Aglio - Saggezza
Summary: Ren Gyokuen muses on her most beloved son, her beautifully deranged Hakuryuu. Drabble, rated T for dark themes.


**I have a fairly long, by my own standards, JuHaku one-shot coming up, but this little drabble snuck up on me after a post I saw on tumblr, and I wrote it all out in about half an hour. So here you go, some extremely twisted GyokuRyuu family fluff...of sorts.**

 **Word count: 676**

 **Warning(s): this is dark. Like, seriously. Nothing like my usual fare.**

 **Disclaimer: I disclaim.**

* * *

Ah, her little Hakuryuu is a special existence indeed.

He would probably loathe her even more if he caught wind of these thoughts of hers, but out of her four children, _he's_ the one who resembles her the most: which is, obviously, why he's also her favorite.

Hakuyuu and Hakuren were always their father's sons through and through, so disgustingly noble and brave and self-sacrificing that they positively _reeked_ of Solomon's deceitful taint. As for Hakuei, she may have the soul of a true king vessel, but she doesn't have the stomach for rule, the will to cut down any and all who stand between her and her objectives: like her brothers, she's too soft-hearted, ruled too firmly by her pointless, self-righteous morals, to ever bathe in the darkness her mother has thrived in since times immemorial.

Hakuryuu, though…Hakuryuu is a beautifully twisted child. He wears hatred like a royal cloak, his darkened rukh screaming of rage and resentment and ever-growing insanity, and she can't help but watch him with his sworn magi, and laugh, and laugh, and _laugh_. Those two are so _very_ alike, and yet they possess just the right amount of differences to send each other spiraling deeper and deeper into madness. It's a magnificent sight.

Hakuryuu is like her. He isn't weak, like Solomon and all the blithering fools whose minds the abhorrent God-slayer continues to rot and soften and weaken to this day, who look upon the truth of their fate and just soldier on, accepting all the pain and loss life tortures them with as if refraining from striking back will make them _stronger_.

Hakuryuu has no qualms in doing so. Hakuryuu will give back each and every hurt he is inflicted tenfold, no, a hundredfold, and will laugh while he does. To achieve his goals, Hakuryuu will take on the world, commit patricide and regicide and fratricide, start a thousand bloody revolutions and ruthlessly sacrifice all of his pawns, because he is _just like her_ , her sweet, beautiful Hakuryuu.

When she arranged for her husband and sons' deaths, she didn't intend for Hakuryuu to survive – but she isn't disappointed that he did, because something within him had _changed_ , had bent and snapped and shattered just enough that she could now see potential in him; and so she nurtured it.

She was never a mother to Hakuyuu, Hakuren and Hakuei, never once gave them a second thought unless she was keeping up her act in front of her _beloved_ husband and his court. For Hakuryuu, though, she feels a certain kind of love, of motherly pride, because he has all of the dark, exquisitely deadly beauty of atropa belladonna and _she made him that way_ , her foolish little boy, her brilliant, sublime, unhinged, _Fallen_ child.

He's going to kill her one day, and he's going to enjoy every second of it. He will bathe in her blood, dance on her grave, muddy her name throughout the entire world, and then once the euphoria of victory has worn off, he will look for someone else to hate, someone else to destroy with mania in his eyes and pretty, empty words of _justice_ and _retribution_ spilling from his smiling lips.

Because Hakuryuu is _broken_ ,on the deepest, most primal of levels. He doesn't understand how to exist outside of the darkness anymore, because the darkness is all around him, inside his rukh, inside himself. He is the antithesis of all that Solomon stands for, the model image of a true black king vessel, one who will tear a calamitous path through the world because it has wounded him so cruelly, so why would it be wrong, why would it be unfair and perverse and _depraved_ to hurt it back, to raze it and rebuild it from the ground up as per his own vision?

He's the only one of her children that she loves, the only one she's raised so carefully; and so he is just like her.

 _Ah, Father…is this the pride you feel when you look upon your true Children?_


End file.
